Living with Lions Webinar Series 2024

Mountain lions play a critical role in maintaining a healthy natural ecosystem in every landscape they inhabit, but their continued presence in those landscapes is often tenuous.

Our Living with Lions webinar series highlights the challenges mountain lions face in existing in a human-dominated world, as well as the steps that we can take to preserve their presence here.

Interested in hearing the latest developments in mountain lion research? Want to be a more effective advocate for wildlife? These webinars are for you!

Registration is open now for these webinars:

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Image courtesy of Brent Lyles

Onward in 2025, for the Lions!

Wednesday, December 18 at 12pm PT via Zoom

The nature of our mission to save America’s lion often means that for every three steps forward, we stumble backwards a few paces. In 2024, we witnessed incredible milestones for cougar protections, but we also saw devastating set-backs. What is the state of mountain lion protection in 2024? What are our causes for concern and what are our reasons to hope in 2025?

Join Executive Director, R. Brent Lyles, as he reflects on the work of the Mountain Lion Foundation this year and shares his vision for our work going forward to ensure that mountain lions survive and thrive in the wild.

The Speaker

R. Brent Lyles is Executive Director of the Mountain Lion Foundation. Brent began his professional journey teaching middle-school science in rural North Carolina. Since that time, Brent’s career has focused on science education, compassionate and inclusive leadership, and environmental stewardship.

He holds master’s degrees in biological anthropology and not-for-profit management. Before joining the team at the Mountain Lion Foundation in 2022, Brent served as executive director at several not-for-profit organizations in Austin, Texas, and the San Juan Islands, Washington. Other experiences include playing in mediocre rock bands, management consulting, writing national science textbooks, and, as a young person, dreaming about someday seeing a mountain lion in the wild.

Improving Mountain Lion Deterrents with Machine Learning

Wednesday, January 15 at 12pm PT via Zoom

Aditya Viswanathan (center back) is one of eight members of the Pajarito Environmental Education Center (PEEC) Nature Youth Group in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This group of incredible sophomore high school students developed PumaGuard, a machine learning application that detects and identifies, with 99% accuracy, mountain lions on trail cameras. When a puma is detected on camera, PumaGuard automatically triggers multiple deterrent methods to keep both livestock and lion safe. PumaGuard won the team a prestigious prize for their innovative and socially impactful Artificial Intelligence project in the high school track of NeurIPS, the world-renowned AI conference.

In October, Aditya was featured as a speaker at the International Wildlife Coexistence Conference. In December, he is traveling to Vancouver, Canada to present PumaGuard and receive the NeurIPS award for his team. We are lucky to have him as our January Living with Lions Webinar guest to talk about how he, his team, and his fellow young adults are creatively and proactively protecting wildlife for their generation and beyond.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Stay tuned, as each month we will dive in deep with scientists, journalists, authors, policymakers and more. Unless otherwise noted, all talks will take place at noon Pacific time, via Zoom. Registration is free and required in order to receive the link.

All events are free to attend, with donations to support our efforts welcome. This community has contributed well over $10,000 toward mountain lion protection efforts through these webinars since their launch in 2021. It’s inspiring to see so many people not only making time in their lives for mountain lions, but also giving generously to support recovery and co-existence efforts.

Watch our most recent webinar:

A Day in the Life of Two Coexistence Ranchers

If you aren’t already receiving our e-newsletter, sign up today so you don’t miss out when we announce the next events in this series.